Description

Space Giraffe is a fast-paced arcade shooter, created by Ivan Zorzin and Jeff Minter, and built on the Neon Xbox 360 light synthesizer visualisation Minter wrote for the Xbox 360 frontend. Gameplay is similar to the classic Tempest. The player controls a Space Giraffe on the outer rim of a 3D extruded surface. It can be moved around the rim and needs to destroy the enemies that approach from the other side of the surface. Shots fired by enemies either needed to be avoided or can be pushed back by targeting them.

A line on the surface acts as a zone, extending or contracting based on the player's performance. While in the zone, the Space Giraffe can collide with enemies, knock them off the rim and fire additional, guidable shots. Bullets are also slowed down there. Power-ups are called pods. Up to five can be stored and they allow the Space Giraffe to jump, filling the entire power zone. When more than 5 pods are kept, the additional ones provide bonuses such as extra lives, faster bullets, a bonus round or bonus points.

The visuals consists of bright and psychedelic shapes. The different enemies have different attack patterns and include Grunts, Flowers, Boffins, Feedback Monsters, Rotors, Containers and Zappers. There are more than 100 levels in the game and players can play custom music synchronizing with the visuals.

The windows version was updated with a new shader library, used to create a NUXX mix of the graphic design of the levels. It also contains the Acid mix of the original XBLA levels.

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Trivia

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Sales

Developer Jeff Minter was very disappointed with the sales of the XBLA game. On 20th November 2007 he wrote on his blog:

jesus fucking christ
not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.

OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga.